2022 Healthcare Benchmark Report Deep Dive

Ethico was founded to uphold the highest standards of healthcare compliance and we continue to elevate the quality of healthcare E&C worldwide, which is why we brought you the 2022 E&C Hotline Benchmark Report: Healthcare Edition. Still not sure what it means for your program? Enter the EthicsVerse! We’re digging into the report to pull every action item, insight, and integral statistic so you can build a better program. See where the future of healthcare compliance lies, and future-proof your organization. To get a copy of the 2022 Ethics & Compliance Hotline Benchmark Report: HEALTHCARE EDITION for yourself, download it here. Transcript for 2022 Healthcare Benchmark Report Deep Dive Nick Gallo : Hello, everybody. Welcome to the "EthicsVerse." We've got a great show for you guys today. We are gonna just start introductions now as everybody starts to file in. We are here with Ellen Hunt. Ellen, one of our favorite ethics and compliance thought leaders. Super excited to have you on. We're gonna do a deep dive on the Healthcare Benchmark Report. This is the first healthcare benchmark report ever put out in our industry. We have a deep healthcare concentration, so we have enough statistically significant data to draw some really great insights for you to benchmark against. And we have Ellen Hunt who's got a ton of great experience to help us walk through it. If you've attended some of our other ones that have been benchmark deep dives, I wanna encourage you to stay because the insights that Ellen is gonna be bringing while talking sort of primarily about the healthcare industry are absolutely applicable to every single industry and every single company because it's really gonna be focused on organizational justice which we'll get into more in a second. As always, welcome to the EthicsVerse. This is the coolest place to be at 12 Eastern, every Thursday. We want to bring you high-quality content that's gonna help you elevate your program, gives you some actionable tips and techniques to make a bigger impact in your organization. So, why don't we... everybody jump in and say where you're from? As always, we want this chat to be very lively. Ask your questions along the way. We'll do our best to incorporate those into our discussion. So I'm here with Gio, my brother and partner at ComplianceLine, and Ellen Hunt. I'm gonna do my screen share guys, and we can just kind of start diving in here. Okay, so "2022 Healthcare Benchmark Beep Dive." Like we said, it's the only one in the industry. So, Ellen, if you don't know her, you don't follow her on LinkedIn, you really should. She's active on there all the time. And I got to tell you, Ellen, I've never been to a talk of yours or a conversation of yours where I don't get a little nugget that I can steal and apply somewhere else. We were at the Compliance Week, and it was at like the woman's brunch that I snuck into and someone was complaining about, "You know, I don't feel like I get paid enough." And you stood up and you said, "You know what? Unicorns should get paid more." And that has stuck with me. I've said that a thousand times since. I don't think I've credited you every single time, but so glad to have you here. Ellen Hunt : I'm thrilled to be here. It's just an honor to talk about this report. I think there's a tremendous amount of great data here, not only just for healthcare professionals but really for all ethics and compliance professionals. So, thank you so much for inviting me. Nick : Here we go. And everyone, the man who needs no introduction, Gio Gallo, my brother, and partner. All right, let's dive in. Quick commercial. ComplianceLine we have a suite of corporate integrity products that are listed here. We're an alternative to some of the other mainstays in the industry. If you'd like to learn more, please reach out anytime. We'd love to help or just give you some tips on what you should be looking for, how to optimize a program. That's in place if you're locked in a contract or something like that. So, here's our 2022 Hotline Benchmark Report. If you don't have this report right now, please drop your email in the chat, and someone from our team is gonna send this out so you can follow along the way. Okay, so go ahead, drop that in. People on our team are monitoring that chat right now, and we'll try to get that to you during this conversation. As always, world-famous. ComplianceLine EthicsVerse book giveaway. We're gonna be giving away five more books this time. We have a cool library of books written by ethics and compliance professionals or that are kind of ethics and compliance books, HR-driven human behavior books that can make your program better. We are big book nerds. Readers are leaders, as we like to say. So, please participate in the chat. Add your own tips, your own techniques. Like, we like to say on every single "EthicsVerse episode," we are at an interesting point in our industry. There is an inflection point that me, and during our show flow Ellen, we were talking about. There's an inflection point in our industry that we're approaching. The next 10 years is gonna be extremely exciting as we, you know, pull our chair up to the grown folks table, away from the kitty table that a lot of us feel like we've been trapped at for the last, you know, 15 years or something like that. A lot of things are coming together for us and it's our time now to really shine. It's our time to sharpen our saw and to really elevate our program. So, we want to help with this book giveaway and the kind of content we're putting out. Also, we're gonna be giving away five custom benchmark reports. So, if you're a healthcare company and you would like to enter yourself into the drawing, let's go ahead and drop a two in the chat right now and you'll be entered into the drawing and this will be a great report. This is something that's a PDF. You can take to your boss, you can take to the board to show how you stack up against the industry, against other healthcare organizations, and also get a bunch of actionable techniques and actionable tips that you can start implementing right away. So, drop a two in the chat if you're interested in that, and let's get moving. Here's our methodology. The point is that this is a statistically valid approach to doing this. We don't use a lot of rounded numbers. We don't do averages of averages. We try to present the raw values for you so that you can get the clearer picture of what's going on out there. So, we're presenting information over the last four years, and we try to preserve outliers, but we limit it to organizations that have had 10 or more reports. If you just have one or two reports, we go ahead and exclude those, but those are the only alterations to the data that we do. Gio, talk to us about this framework. We talk about this kind of thing all the time and how these three things come together to really drive forward the pace closure time. Giovanni “Gio” Gallo : Yeah. As Ellen and I were discussing in the pre-show in the green room, there are a lot of different ways to look at these data. "Do these apply to me? Does someone else do something different? Does an organization in another state or another specialty, or another size apply to me?" And largely, getting more data is helpful. And, you know, at the core of this is one data point that you might use to kind of define the health of all these other things. This close cases faster. If you're able to close cases faster, it means you're probably doing a bunch of things right. You're probably getting good information, you're probably following up in a consistent way and things like that. Well, to get that, that's really the overlap of these three things. This good employee engagement means that employees are speaking up and they're being transparent and they're being engaged in your program, and they're giving good information and giving things that can be substantiated and identifying themselves. It really starts with that speak-up culture to lead to the listen-up culture. So, then, you know, if you have that right, your employees are doing their part. Well, then whoever is managing your hotline, your web form, your mobile app, your texting whatever that is. If you have that adaptive intake, the Compliance 3.0 version of the adaptive intake is being empathetic, right? Whether that's asking the right questions. Not boring people with, you know, too long of an automated greeting, not making them wait too long or just, you know, understanding how to get through that elicitation, that interview in order to get to the good answers. Well, if you have that involvement from your employees and your intake is adaptive and empathetic, and then you follow that up with systematic follow-up so that you can actually kind of take consistent action, follow up on things, get things to the right people in the right order with the right priority and triage and things like that. When all of those three things come together, you're gonna see your performance, you know, be rated pretty well against the benchmark in a bunch of different areas. And one of those areas will be that speed to which you close cases. And, you know, we're really proud of the excellent ethics experts we work with who do work on our software platform, and we see them closing cases and many times on average almost twice as fast as organizations that do it other ways. And that's because, you know, they're focused on all three of those things as these things happen. Just doing one of those really well and the other ones poorly is probably not gonna get you as far down the path. Nick : So, Ellen, we were talking in the show flow and we kept coming back to this refrain about moral injury and more broadly, organizational justice. I love your thought leadership in general, I love your spirit and I love what you bring to this conversation and I'm really interested to see how we can weave this through all these different data points so that we can kind of humanize this process more. But where do you see organizations fall flat on their process relative to the organizational justice opportunity? Ellen : Yeah, so I think there's a couple of areas. And just in general, you know, organizational justice has three or four prongs, depending upon which researcher you're following. But generally, it's, "Am I compensated fairly, right? Is there equity in pay? Is there procedural justice? Do I feel that the organization has processes and procedures that are gonna treat me fairly, right?" And then there's the inner relationship which is, "Do I have a boss that I think has integrity? Do I think that the people that I work with are honest, transparent, and are gonna do the right thing?" I think it's critical when we look at the great resignation and where our workforce is going and where ethics and compliance will be in the next 5 to10 years. Because it is to me, the absolute core, if not the heartbeat, of every ethics and compliance program. Because if you can't accomplish organizational justice and if you are not knocking it out of the park in regards to your hotline and investigations with procedural justice, you're really never gonna have an effective program. And we know that people are walking out the door because of moral injury or because they're ethics refugees. We talked a little bit about the war on talent, but it's really a war on opportunity. People have decided, "Now, I have other opportunities, and I'm not going to settle to work for a place that I don't think treats me with justice, whether that's fairness in pay or fairness when I raise the concern." And so we talked a lot about Speak Up campaigns, but one of the things we don't do is tell people what happens when they do. We're not utilizing our hotline portals and our other communications to tell people about the process. We're not following up and we're not being transparent about some of the results. And so, we can say, speak up all you want, but if we're really not talking about what happens when you do, you're not gonna get to that nice diagram that Gio was talking about, right? When you're able to have empathy and you're able to treat people, go fairly and close those cases and resolve those concerns. Because when you get back to the heart of it, the ethics and compliance program is there to find and fix. Nick : That's right. And so, I think that's a good transition into this next slide where we're talking about reporting channel usage. And I think the big takeaway from this slide is that particularly during the pandemic, we saw a pretty big pop in hotline usage, right? That went from about 60% and it's sort of stayed here and the new normal, but something that I think... so if you're looking at your own, you know, we're gonna talk about a lot of these different factors. What you need to recognize is that while this benchmarking is helpful to see what other folks are doing, the best benchmark is yourself and where you've come from. So, comparing your data to last year or two years ago or to whenever normal was and being able to explain differences and see is there a systemic problem here? Is there something I can explain away from an anecdote or from a story? And what can I do to kind of get that process going better and better? That's really gonna be the best place to start. But you, Ellen, just mentioned something about the process. And I think when we see people who are coming over from somewhere else or they have a relatively lower, you know, reporting rate than other than what they would like, let's say, so much of what we end up like advising folks on is what kind of campaign can you push forward to drive more information into the minds of these human sensors that are inside of your organization? Gio, you talk to us a little bit about how we can turn these people on by building trust in that process to Ellen's point. Gio : Yeah. I mean, I kind of think of three or four points of influence and, you know, increasingly, we're coaching compliance officers and ethics experts across all layers of the organization to think of these different points of influence. I think a lot of times we might get a little bit too focused on, "Hey, this is what I've done, and I need to fix this thing," and zooming out might help you do that. So, those four are like the pre-message that you give to employees. Like the first point of engagement. What happens when they hit your web form? What happens when they're looking up to find out where to go? What is the experience like when they call the hotline? So, that's first point and then it's the follow-up, and then it's the wrap-up. So, all four of those points are ways that you can influence, you know, I think we need to realize that each employee is like a prism. Each employee, the interactions that you have with them refract out and they're gonna have a bunch of other interactions with other employees and say, "Hey, that was great." And point